Cattle industry fighting to bar "meat" and "beef" from plant-based protein packaging

The nation's largest cattle industry lobby group is fighting to defend the traditional meaning of the word "meat." The U.S. Cattlemen's Association filed a petition last month with the Department of Agriculture arguing that "lab-grown and plant-based products should not use the terms 'meat' or 'beef'" on their labels. Kelly Fogarty, whose family has raised Black Angus cattle for five generations, represents hundreds of ranchers as the executive vice president of the U.S. Cattlemen's Association. For them, defining meat is easy. "We don't want them to think of a laboratory. We don't want them to think of something that's created under a microscope," Fogarty told CBS News' Jamie Yuccas.The association is concerned about the increase of animal-free products that have names like beef-less ground beef. The Cattlemen's federal petition argues "the labels of 'beef' or 'meat' should inform consumers that the product is derived naturally from animals as opposed to alternative proteins such as plants…artificially grown in a laboratory."But Ethan Brown, the CEO of Beyond Meat says it's time to rethink that definition. This isn't the first fight over food labeling. Dairy farmers have, so far, been unsuccessful in their battle to make the word "milk" exclusive to products from cows. In some stores, these animal-free alternatives are currently sold alongside their competitors.